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A newly launched nonprofit organization, the Nutrition Science Initiative, will try to find an answer to the question, “What should we eat to be healthy?” NuSI is nothing if not ambitious: its goal is to seek "the end of fad diets and high obesity rates."

The founders of the organization, called NuSI (pronounced "new see") for short, are Gary Taubes and Peter Attia. Taubes is the science journalist who helped launch the low-carb diet resurgence with his controversial New York Times magazine articles and subsequent books, Good Calories, Bad Calories and Why We Get Fat. Attia, who is the President of NuSI, trained in surgery at Johns Hopkins and the NIH before working as a consultant at McKinsey & Company.

NuSI was founded on the premise that the reason we are beset today by epidemics of obesity and type 2 diabetes, and the reason physicians and researchers think these diseases are so recalcitrant to dietary therapies, is because of our flawed understanding of their causes. We believe that with a concerted effort and the best possible science, this problem can be fixed.

The NuSI scientific advisory board is composed of Alan Sniderman, a lipid researcher at McGill University, David Harlan, the former head of the Diabetes, Endocrinology, & Metabolic Diseases branch of the NIDDK and now at U Mass, Mitchel Lazar, of the University of Pennsylvania, and Kevin Schulman, of Duke University.

On his Weighty Matters blog, obesity clinician and writer Yoni Freehoff offers a perspective both critical and supportive of the NuSI agenda.

Here is the press release from the Nutrition Science Initiative:

New Research Organization Could Mark the End of Fad Diets and High Obesity Rates

The Nutrition Science Initiative Seeks to Definitively Answer the Question: What Should We Eat to be Healthy?

SAN DIEGO - September 6, 2012 – In response to the skyrocketing prevalence of obesity and diabetes in the United States today and the estimated $150 billion in related healthcare expenditures, a consortium of respected clinicians and scientists from the fields of endocrinology, metabolism, diabetes, obesity, and nutrition, today launch a new nonprofit organization to finally, and with scientific certainty, answer the question: “What should we eat to be healthy?”

The Nutrition Science Initiative (NuSI) is dedicated to dramatically reducing the economic and social burden of obesity and obesity-related diseases by significantly improving nutrition science. NuSI seeks to unambiguously clarify the relationship between diet and obesity and its related diseases as a result of a growing acceptance that nutrition science is – and historically has been – significantly substandard as compared to other scientific disciplines such as chemistry, biology, or physics.

“The question of the right diet has seemingly been settled in the public for years, yet obesity rates continue to rise. This contradiction begs the question: Do we really have good science to support our dietary recommendations? The answer is convincingly no,” says Kevin Schulman, M.D., Professor of Medicine and Business Administration and Director of the Duke Clinical Research Institute and the Center for Clinical and Genetic Economics at Duke University. “The largest public health crisis in the United States is being addressed with the type of data that we reject in every other field of medicine: observational studies subject to selection bias and small scale, short-term clinical studies which can’t offer definitive results.”

Born from a shared vision of its co-founders, Peter Attia, M.D. and Gary Taubes, NuSI will fund research that applies first-of-its-kind, rigorous scientific experimentation to the field of nutrition and will communicate its findings to the public and decision-makers alike in an effort to significantly improve the quality of nutritional guidance, dietary recommendations, and policies.

“Diet has profound importance for human health,” said NuSI co-founder Gary Taubes. “NuSI will catalyze a revolution in nutrition science by challenging both the conventional wisdom that obesity is caused simply by eating too many calories and the alternative hypothesis that obesity is caused less by the actual number of calories consumed and more by the type of calories consumed. We see an effective way to address the problem, and the solution is within our reach.”